While regular advertisements are the most common form that you encounter on the Internet, for instance as banners on a website like this one, you may also encounter other forms of advertisement that are not quite as common, but often more distracting or annoying than the first kind.

A fairly new type are so called picture overlay ads that are offered by companies such as AdMedia and its overlay ads, GumGum or Linear Publishing to name a few companies. The ads are displayed on top of images on websites, usually in the lower half of the image.

They do take a quarter of a fifth of the image space effectively preventing the user from looking at the image in its complete form.

Count down pages are another form of advertisement, usually implemented by image or file hosting websites. They are intermediary pages that are displayed to the user for some time before the actual page with the requested contents are displayed in the browser.

They too can be highly annoying as you are forced to wait before you can continue whenever you want to download or view files that are hosted by these services. Sometimes, links are subject to this as well. They are popular on forums and other file sharing sites on the Internet, as part of the revenue from those ads goes directly to the user who created the doorway page in first place. Adfly alone for instance tracks millions of link clicks per day.

The userscript NoPicAds provides you with three different features. It blocks popular overlay image ads so that you can view the image in all its glory without ads attached to it. It also takes care of select count down pages by bypassing the directly so that you are taken to the countdown immediately without wait time. Last but not least, it is also preventing some pop up windows from being spawned in the web browser.

You find the list of supported websites listed on the userscript's page. Included are popular services such as adf.ly, linkbucks, reklama, imgonion, adcrun, abload, imgchili or urlcash to name a few. If you are looking for a solution for a particular service that you encounter over and over again, check out the list there to see if it is covered by it.

I have tested the userscript in Firefox with Greasemonkey, and in Google Chrome, and it worked in both web browsers without issues.

Note that other extensions may also block these types of ads. NoScript for instance takes care of image overlay ads by its own.

Verdict

If you encounter image overlay ads or count down pages regularly, you may want to give this a try to speed things up for you and remove contents from websites that block your access to the real content that you are interested in.

Advertisement

We need your help

Advertising revenue is falling fast across the Internet, and independently-run sites like Ghacks are hit hardest by it. The advertising model in its current form is coming to an end, and we have to find other ways to continue operating this site.

We are committed to keeping our content free and independent, which means no paywalls, no sponsored posts, no annoying ad formats or subscription fees.

If you like our content, and would like to help, please consider making a contribution:

About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Thank you Martin Brinkman for this info. I have have this happen to me more than once and it is beyond annoying. Another thing about them is the page skips around and if I try to click around it I click the ad instead!!!!!!!!!!! They will not be ignored. I will use NoPicsAds starting today because I know you do not recommend anything that does not work or will be dangerous from first hand knowledge. Please keep up the good work cause I have learned a lot from you and this site.

I have suddenly been plagued with these overlay ads, so I installed Greasermonkey and NoPicsAds … they both claimed to have installed successfully. I then restarted my computer, but nothing has changed … the overlay ads continue. I am not knowledgeable about computers, so what did I not do to activate NpPicsAds? I assumed once they were installed there was nothing more to do. Is my Firefox bad and should I reload it?

You may want to try other add-ons instead if the script does not block the image ads. Or, you could contact the author of the script and provide feedback so that the ads you are experiencing are blocked as well by it.

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.